Planning

Problems and tasks from a variety of sources intended to illustrate
the way mathematics arises in life and work.

Setting Prices. Find the optimal price for a student
magazine given polling information on the number that will be purchased
at different prices.

Mixing Fertilizer. In preparing fertilizer for a garden, a
homeowner poured one quart of concentrated liquid fertilizer into a
two-gallon can, and filled the can with water. She then discovered that
the proper ratio of fertilizer to water should have been 1:3. How much
more liquid fertilizer should she add to the current mixture to obtain the
desired concentration?

Critical Path Analysis. Make a critical path diagram for
planning a dinner party.

Routing Elevators. Determine the time it takes for elevators
in an office building to transport workers to their offices if they all
arrive just before 9:00 a.m. Would it help if certain elevators were
restricted to serving specific floors?

Repairing Lights. An electrician is called on to repair an
old fixture with three fluorescent lights. Each light has a tube, a
ballast, and two wires, one or more of which may be the source of
the problem. Because of the way the fixture is wired, any bad ballast
will cause the entire fixture to fail, whereas a bad wire or bad tube
will just cause one light to fail. Devise a strategy for diagnosing the
problem, bearing in mind the possibility that there may be more than one
bad component.

Planning a Vacation. A young couple with two children and an
eight-year-old car is trying to decide whether to fly or drive 1500 miles
each way for a vacation to Disney World. They have saved $2000 for the
trip and estimate that four sale-priced airline tickets would take about
half that. If they drive, they will have to pay for travel expenses
(motels, food, gas, and tolls), will lose wages for extra days off from
work, and will run the risk of a breakdown with their eight-year old car.
What should they do?

Roasting Coffee. A production manager at a coffee roasting
facility keeps track of data on the projected and actual demand for
various blends of coffee. Since the projected demand often exceeds the
facility's total capacity, he must prioritize his production schedule in
the hope of meeting real demand. Given the data for the past twelve
months, and the projected demand for the next two, what production
schedule should he order for those two months?

Building a Hospital. A city council is looking into the
wisdom of building a hospital on land that the city has recently acquired
in a rapidly growing area. In addition to the cost-benefit issues
involved in running the hospital, there are matters of additional
infrastructure (roads, sewer, waste disposal), jobs (first for
construction, then for running the hospital), housing (both for hospital
employees and for those attracted because of the increased health
services), and taxes (as a non-profit institution, the hospital would be
exempt from most taxes). Each of these factors changes with time--some
relatively predictably, others less so (e.g., rates of population
growth). A mathematical model can link all these variables to produce a
variety of "what if" scenarios. It is not uncommon for such models to
reveal patterns that cannot be foreseen when the variables are considered
one at a time.